


manqué

by kirkaut



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Slow Build, scene of domestic violence bc Dean is the worst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-05-23 21:57:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6131443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirkaut/pseuds/kirkaut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Manqué (adj.) [French]<br/><i>used to describe what a person could or should have been, but never was.</i> </p><p>(Eggsy resists an impulse, and everything changes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> I think the word 'Manqué' is meant to have more of a negative connotation, but given the nature of this fic I couldn't resist using it as the title.
> 
> Also, I've been reading a lot of those 'Cool Foreign Words We Need in English' lists and they're just great. Chester King was a real Backpfeifengesicht.
> 
>  
> 
> **This chapter contains a hefty amount of Dean related violence. Please be warned, this is where the domestic abuse tag comes into play.**

 

 

 

 

 

When Eggsy was fourteen years old, he scrimped and saved the meagre wages he earned sweeping up and wiping down the Black Prince every now and then - whenever Paul got that look in his eyes that said he felt sorry for Eggsy, really - and saw movie _The Butterfly Effect._

Not out of any personal desire, honestly, except for the fact that he’d fancied a girl in his year at school named Annie Bewick and _she’d_ fancied Ashton Kutcher at the time, so he’d jumped at the chance to take her to see the newly released film.

The movie had been alright, if a bit morbid and unhappy, but Eggsy had gotten a soft kiss on the mouth at the end of the night, so he’d counted it as a win.

That is, until the next week, when Annie decided that she and Liam Murray from the year above were meant for one another and promptly forgot all about Eggsy and Ashton Kutcher in favour of their seven week long whirlwind romance. He’d been a bit miffed, honest, but by the time that Liam and Annie’s romance had publicly and spectacularly imoloded in the school cafe, he’d redirected his own affections over to Matty Burnside.

Matty, who cared fuck all about Ashton Kutcher and played video games with Eggsy in his tiny bedroom in the flat instead, and who had pressed Eggsy back into his mattress with a breathless laugh and kissed him like he was scared, and kept kissing him a bit more bravely every day until his Dad got a new job in the northeast and they’d had to move.

Anyway, point is, Eggsy knows all about that bit of chaos theory, the thought that small causes have large effects, if only because he’d watched close to two hours worth of Ashton Kutcher mucking up his own life, time and time again, and the concept had stuck.

But knowing something in theory and seeing it being put into motion are two completely different things. Which is why, all things considered, Eggsy doesn’t realise that one split second decision - the resistance of an impulse - changes his life.

He’s been kicked out of the flat, Dean smugly kissing his mum as he slams the door shut, and is just trying to lick his wounds in peace at the Prince with Ryan and Jamal, and is in no fucking mood for Rottweiler’s shit when he starts going.

“Oi! You think you can chat shit about us and we won’t do nothin’ just cos our guvna’s banging Eggsy’s mum?” Rottie demands, all hot tempered and prickling for a chance to slap Eggsy around a bit. He’s never forgiven him for the time that Eggsy picked his pocket for his mobile and, upon the discovery of several pictures of a part of Rottie that Eggsy would rather have never seen in his entire life, had sent them to every person in his contact list.

So, yeah. He’s always gunned for Eggsy a bit harder than the rest of Dean’s lot, but Eggsy has a hard time resisting the way he goes all purple and mottled when he’s pissed. He scrunches up his face, and considers the accusation. “Pretty much, yeah,” he admits, staying slumped in his seat.

“Let’s just leave,” Jamal begs quietly, fidgeting anxiously, “let’s just go, man, it’s not worth it.”

Rottweiler rises from his booth, followed slowly by the rest of his troupe, and leans menacingly against the table. “You boys have outstayed your welcome,” he says, and leans closer to Jamal as he does it, before he waves a hand in a dismissive motion towards the door. “Leave.”

As he leans there, bent over and staring resolutely at the entrance to the Prince like he can get them out of his presence by sheer will alone, Eggsy’s eyes dart to the side.

Rottie’s keys dangle tantalisingly from the corner of his pocket.

Eggsy runs his tongue along his teeth, and his fingers itch, and before he quite knows what he’s doing, he’s shooting up to his feet, face only a few inches from Rottweiler’s and his jaw clenched in determination.

“What,” the other man bites out, giving Eggsy an unimpressed once over, practically daring him to start something.

Eggsy’s fingers flick out, but before he can make contact with the key ring, he stops.

If he does this - if he steals the keys, steals the car, and goes for a joyride - Rottie’s gonna call Dean. He’d never risk calling the brass, not with the sheer amount of illegal shit that Dean and his lot get up to with drugs and underground gambling, but he’d call Dean in a heartbeat.

Eggsy thinks about what that might mean for him, or worse, what it’d mean for his mum and Daisy, and his fingers stall.

His hand drops back into his pocket, empty hand clenching painfully into a ball, and drops his gaze in defeat.

“Sorry about that, bruv,” he mutters, and tucks his tail between his legs as he leaves.

The night is bitterly cold, but Eggsy is flush with anger and barely feels the sting of the chilly winter air.

“They weren’t fucking worth it, boys,” Ryan reassures Eggsy and Jamal, like he really needs to remind them that getting their faces caved in would be a bad idea.

Eggsy’s breathing hard, and his lungs burn with the cold. “It’s freezing,” he sulks, and zips his jacket all the way up with fingers that are quickly going numb. “Should’ve nicked his fucking keys.”

Jamal finishes shoving his woolen hat atop his head and gives Eggsy a bewildered glance out of the side of his eyes. “You was gonna jack his fucking car keys, bruv?” he asks, sounding more astonished than Eggsy thinks the situation strictly necessitates. “You got a death wish or summat?”

“No,” Eggsy snaps, and burrows more firmly into his coat as they cross by Rottie’s car. He can’t quite resist the urge to give the front tire a vicious kick, though it probably does more damage to his trainer than the rubber. “Which is why I didn’t, yeah? Don’t need Dean deciding my mum makes a good punching bag when he’s pissed at me, do I?” He kicks the tire again. “Fuck!”

Jamal slings an arm around his shoulders and pulls him away from the car, jostling Eggsy firmly into his side as he guides them down the pavement in the direction of his flat. “Trust me, bruv,” he says, and shares a pointed look with Ryan from across Eggsy’s shoulders. “Sick as that would’ve been, it’s probably best we didn’t.”

“Yeah, but,” Ryan starts, casting a longing glance back at the suped up yellow car, “it would have been fucking mint.” He snickers. “Imagine the look on ‘is face if you had!” Jamal gives a long-suffering sigh, and Eggsy has to try not to laugh at the way Ryan desperately attempts to school his face into nonchalance and shrugs with a, “But, y’know, another time, maybe.”

“You are so shit at this,” Jamal hisses, making Ryan throw up his hands in a huff, and Eggsy can’t keep from laughing then.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and slings one arm around Ryan’s shoulders and the other around Jamal’s back. “Another day, bruvs.”

They continue down the street, breaths puffing into a fine fog that trails behind them.

The knowledge that he’s done the right thing isn’t quite enough to keep him from imagining, well into the night, about what may have happened if he’d said ‘fuck it’ to the consequences and slipped the keys into his hand. He wonders how far the three of them would have gotten, how many laws they could have broken and how much time they could have had, pretending to be free, before the flash of lights behind them would have put a stop to it.

And if the police hadn’t found them - if Eggsy had just abandoned Rottie’s car in a car park and...fuck, set fire to it or summat, and stumbled home all drunk on careless happiness - what it would feel like to face Dean and know he’s successfully delivered one of his biggest ‘fuck you’s to him and his lot, served on a silver platter.

He’d have gotten himself into some proper shit with them, he knows. He can’t even begin to imagine the beating he would have taken, surrounded by all of them at once and taking blow after blow until someone either put him out of his misery or his body failed him completely, but before all of that he’d have the memory of those blissful moments spent speeding about in Rottweiler’s car, Ryan and Jamal whooping happily in his ear.

He lays in bed and curls his empty hand into a fist and shoves it underneath the pillow.

“‘s for the best,” he reassures himself with a whisper, and wills himself to sleep.

ooo

Eggsy's delicate hold on his self control lasts a scant few weeks longer after the confrontation with Rottweiler. He does his best not to antagonise Dean or any one of his stooges, and even though he desperately wants to smash Rottie's face in, the constipated look he gets whenever Eggsy refuses to take the bait he dangles in front of him is almost worth it entirely on its own.

A strange silence falls over the flat where he lives, a palpable tension that builds and builds when Eggsy stops snapping back at Dean in favour of heated, angry silences, and Dean retaliates by spewing increasingly more vindictive shit about Eggsy and deliberately groping his mum when he knows Eggsy will catch them. He's doing his best not to fuck things up, has been suppressing the itch in his fingers ever since that night at the Prince, but Dean is making it really fucking hard not to lash out.

He starts spending his nights at the flat that Ryan and Jamal share, and enjoys being nothing but a jobless twenty-four year old just hanging out with his mates, no worries about drunk step-fathers breathing down his neck or the ever thinning thread by which his anger hangs over a precipice.

After a few days of nothing but playing Call of Duty and more Netflix than Eggsy has ever watched in his entire life, the guilt begins to set in. He feels it like a cold stone, sinking from his throat down to his gut, when he thinks about his mum and Daisy, left to their own devices in a house filled with Dean and his hot temper. He scrounges up the small assortment of clothing he’d brought and takes his leave, despite Ryan and Jamal's assurances that they don't mind if he kips on the sofa for a few more days.

He burrows himself inside of his winter coat, slings his Adidas bag over his shoulder, and shuffles his way home. The stairs leading up to the flat seem somehow simultaneously endless and like they can’t go on quite long enough, his feet like lead as he ascends.

He fiddles with his keys for longer than strictly necessary, but steels himself with a sigh through his nose, and turns the lock.

The first thing he notices is that the telly’s on; _Top Gear,_ from the sounds of it. The second thing he notices is how Daisy is _wailing_ , eyes red and watery and her face all snotty. He drops his bag to the ground as he shuts the door and immediately bustles over to her, running his hand along her face and making soothing noises all the while.

The third thing he notices is the way his mum’s head snaps towards him and she immediately rises from her place on the couch, hands raised placatingly and her eyes wide and frightened as she shoves at his shoulders. “Eggsy,” she whispers, sounding fretful and manic. “Please go, babe, he’s in a right state. Take your sister and leave, please, love, just leave - ”

The door to the bedroom that she and Dean share slams open, leaving a handle-sized hole in the plaster of their flat. Eggsy shoots to his feet and tries to shove his mum behind him as Dean stumbles into the doorway, hands white-knuckled on the frame.

“You,” Dean seethes, and starts forward unsteadily. As he gets closer, it’s easier to smell the liquor, to see the way his pupils are almost totally dilated, the faint ring of blood around his left nostril from a coke-induced nosebleed. Eggsy pulls Michelle back and as far behind him as he can manage, which is easier said than done when she digs her fingers into his arm and refuses to be pushed back.

“Where the _fuck_ you been, then?” Dean demands, fisting his hands into Eggsy’s collar and pulling tight, forcing Eggsy up onto the balls of his feet to accommodate. “Sent your mum into a proper fuss, and I’m the one who’s had to listen to every fucking word of it!” He sniffs loudly and roughly, and breathes heavily into Eggsy’s face. “I oughta chain you to your bed, you fucking maggot, so’s I can get some peace and fucking quiet without that bitch doing me head in.”

All at once, Eggsy's careful grasp on his temper disappears, pure rage taking its place.

“Shut your _fucking mouth_ ,” Eggsy snarls, reaching up to curl his hands around Dean’s wrists and rearing his head back for a brutal headbutt. His skull connects with Dean’s nose with a satisfying crunch, which, in addition to making the man lose his grip on Eggsy and go stumbling back, gives him the added satisfaction of watching Dean bleed all over himself.

Dean rights himself and pulls his palm away from his face, bright crimson streaming from his nostrils and ruddying up his moustache and beard, dripping through the cracks in his fingers and trailing down to scars that criss-cross over the backs of his hands. His face is stony when he says, “You’re fucking dead, Muggsy.”

He strides forward, and Michelle darts between them, hands outstretched in a belated attempt to keep the peace. “Dean, please,” she starts to beg, tears dripping freely down her face, but the man is too far gone to even care about what he’s doing when he whips an arm out to the side and cracks it forward, backhanding Michelle straight across the face.

She falls to the ground with a choked cry of pain, hand trembling above her cheekbone as she curls into herself, and Eggsy’s rage froths up and boils over.

He sucker punches Dean in the gut while he has the chance, the bigger man sneering down at his mum with blatant disdain, and takes the opportunity to hammer fist him in the temple when he doubles over, wheezing.

He’s momentarily stunned, which is all the time Eggsy needs to gather his mum up and shove her out of the line of fire before Dean can recover and retaliate. The blow, when it comes, isn’t unexpected in the slightest but it still hurts like a bitch when Dean grabs him by the right ear with one hand and slams a fist into his face with the other.

Eggsy grunts as pain knocks around inside his skull, and then cries out when Dean hits him again in the same spot and pain quickly splinters into agony. He wrenches his head to the side and bites down on Dean’s wrist, hard as he can, spitting around overheated flesh and wiry arm hair.

Dean releases him with an angry shout, wrenching his wrist away and leaving his torso wide open, so Eggsy takes a deep breath and charges forward, nearly knocking the breath out of his lungs as he collides with Dean’s not inconsiderable mass and sends them both crashing to the ground. The coffee table collapses beneath them, but luckily Dean takes the brunt of the impact and gets the wind taken out of him, giving Eggsy the perfect opportunity to shove one hand against his chest and curl the other into a fist, punching Dean in the face as many times as he can manage before it feels like the bones in his hands are going to break.

He pauses in his assault, breathing heavily and trying to get his eyes to focus around the throbbing in his skull, and takes the chance to look over at his mum. She’s got Daisy gathered in her arms now, and is hunkered down protectively between Eggsy’s room and the toilet, the infant still screaming hysterically in her arms. There’s a bruise rising across her cheek already, and her eye looks as if it’s swelling shut a bit. She’s doing her best to muffle her own sobs into the downy-soft tufts of hair on Daisy’s head, trying to turn them into soothing noises and failing miserably, and the look in her eyes as she stares at Eggsy is one of unabashed fear.

“You all right, mum?” he asks breathlessly.

He’s so busy looking at her, so busy waiting for an answer, that the punch straight to his ribs catches him by surprise. He goes careening off to the side, wheezing as his lungs contract in panic, and Dean wastes absolutely no time in throwing as much of his own weight atop Eggsy as he can and returning the favour, punch for punch.

Blood floods Eggsy’s mouth and slides down his throat and it makes him splutter and choke whenever he tries to take a breath, and the overwhelming coppery taste of it makes him gag and choke all over again.

He tries to throw his right arm into a punch, but Dean sees it coming from a mile away - Eggsy’s movements sluggish from the blows he’s been dealt - and pins his hand back to the carpet, squeezing meaty fingers around Eggsy’s wrist until the delicate bones grind and break with a sickening crunch. He can’t hold back the guttural howl that erupts from his throat, but Dean’s grip only loosens when he transfers it from Eggsy’s wrist to press in on the column of his throat, tightening with intent.

There's blood in his left eye as well, dripping down from a painful split in his eyebrow and leaking red across his vision. Luckily, it seems he won’t have to worry about that particular problem for long, since the very same eye appears to be quickly swelling shut.

Dean pauses in his assault just briefly to catch his breath, so Eggsy gathers all the blood and phlegm clogging up the back of his throat and pools it onto his tongue. He spits the disgusting blob upwards, craning his head up to make sure his aim is right, and feels his ribs contract painfully with the effort, the way his throat crushes a bit further as he’s forced up into Dean’s stranglehold. It’s worth it, though, to see the foul drip of blood and saliva down Dean’s face.

Dean lets out a string of curses, each one promising Eggsy a retribution more heinous than the last as he lets go of Eggsy’s throat and wipes at his face. He’s distracted, focused on Eggsy and all the ways he can kill him with his bare hands, which is probably the only reason Michelle is able to sneak up behind him, full bottle of wine in her hands, and take a swing at his head.

The bottle connects with his head and sends Dean slumping off to the side, blessedly removing his weight from Eggsy’s stomach, and he gasps for the air he didn’t realise was being restricted until this moment.

He feels his mum’s hands tuck under his armpits, hears the desperate, hitching pleas that tumble from her mouth as she pulls him back across the carpet in short bursts. Dean is curled into himself on the ground, hands clasped about his head, but he appears to be making concentrated efforts to shake off the blow and get up, and it spurs Eggsy into motion. Rolling himself over and onto his knees takes more effort than Eggsy could have ever imagined, but between the nausea rolling in his gut and the screaming agony in his ribs and wrist, he manages to scramble up and quickly usher his mum and Daisy into his bedroom.

He slams the door shut and throws the lock into place, and does his best to go about grabbing the heavy, military grade trunk at the foot of his bed so he can block the door a bit better, but his injuries make it almost impossible to drag it back for any longer than an inching pull. He almost weeps in relief when it starts budging along the floor at a faster pace, and gives Michelle a grateful look over the top of it as they set it into place across the door.

He crosses over to his bed and sits on the edge of it heavily, body listing to the side even as he does his best to keep himself between his mum, Daisy, and the barricaded door. He coughs, and blood flecks across his jeans, across the bedspread. “Fuck,” he grits out, and shoves his good hand into his back pocket to pull out his mobile.

His thumb hovers over the ‘9’, and he hesitates. He wants to hit it three times, wants to summon the police to the flat so Dean can be put in lock up, but he knows that Dean’s got a few members of the fuzz sitting nicely in his pocket, so it probably wouldn’t take long for him to weasel his way back onto the streets.

He would kill Eggsy then, for sure. Maybe even his mum. Maybe even Daisy.

He drops his mobile heavily into his lap and rubs at the bitter sting of tears in the eye that isn’t swollen and bruised.

There’s a loud, deafening ‘bang’ from the other side of the door as Dean pounds his fists so hard against it that it rattles dangerously in the frame, and Eggsy can’t waste another second weighing his options.

He digs his hand beneath his collar, feels himself smearing blood all down his neck as he does, and pulls the medal off with a brutal yank that makes the chain bite into his skin.

It’s scuffed from years of wear and tear, no longer the bright and gleaming thing it was when that tall stranger presented it to him seventeen years ago. It’s covered in blood now, too; red that beads strangely amongst all the gold.

He wipes as much as he can off of the numbers on the back, and dials them in with shaking fingers.

There’s another forceful ‘bang’ from the front room, and Daisy lets out an ear-splitting wail at the same time that Michelle lets loose a frightened, choked off sob. The dial tone is hard to hear under the sound of all of that and Eggsy’s own ragged breathing, his thundering heartbeat.

There’s a click, the sound of someone just picking up on the other line, and Eggsy wastes no time and doesn’t bother waiting for pleasantries.

“Oxfords, not...please,” he rasps, throat aching and coated in blood. “It’s Eggsy Unwin, fuck, wait, Gary Unwin. Me step-dad, he’s gonna kill us, and I can’t call the fucking police because it’s never worked before and...Oxfords, not Brogues, please, my mum is hurt and my sister, she’s only a baby, I can’t let him hurt them, I _can’t._ ”

There’s another loud bang and the sound of splintering wood as the door begins to submit to Dean’s will, and it’s followed by a rough shout of, _“I’m gonna fuckin’ skin you alive, Muggsy!”_

“Shit,” Eggsy curses quietly, still talking to the silent party on the other end of the phone. “Oh, fucking _cock_ , please, the door won’t hold much longer and I…” he swallows, and then immediately regrets it because it burns every single inch of the way down his esophagus. “I’m...really not doing too well, to be honest. I’m a bit fucked.”

There’s another gentle ‘click’ down the line, and then a voice, thick with a Scottish brogue. “Eggsy. Listen very carefully.”

He nods, head swimming just enough that he forgets the stranger on the other end can’t see it. He flinches when Dean slams into the door once more, and he can’t stop the whimper that escapes him when a large crack begins to appear in the centre of the door.

“Help is on the way, Eggsy,” the Scottish voice assures, sounding firm. “All we need from you is an address, and to keep yourself, your mother, and your sister calm. Can you do that?”

“Yeah, he slurs, and tilts dangerously to the side. His mum’s hand against his shoulder is the only thing that stops him from colliding with the mattress, and he blinks away the black that’s creeping in on the edges of his vision just long enough to mumble out the address to their flat.

“Very good, Eggsy,” the man says, sounding faintly relieved. “Now, this is very important. Are you listening?”

Eggsy hums and forces his eyes open. He doesn’t have any memory of them drifting shut, which is mildly concerning.

“Eggsy,” the man says more forcefully when a moment goes by where Eggsy does nothing but breathe heavily into his mobile. His commanding voice sends a familiar response through Eggsy’s body, snapping him to attention and making him more coherent, if only slightly. He spares a second to thank his brief - but apparently effective - Marines training for the deeply ingrained reaction to an ordering tone. “Pay attention. Is there anything, anything at all, that you can use as a weapon? A cricket bat, a heavy trophy of some sort...anything?”

“G-Golf clubs,” he says, choking on the words as a new wave of blood drips down his nasal passage and into the back of his throat. He gives a hacking cough to clear it out, wincing as it coats the crook of his elbow where he’d buried the motion. He wheezes into the microphone as his ribs protest angrily, something in lungs feeling not quite right.

“That’ll do,” the man says, something mildly pleased in his words. “Alright, Eggsy, pick up the driver. Can you do that?”

Eggsy staggers to his feet and peers down at the set of clubs, considering. “M’wrist is broken,” he mumbles, but tucks the mobile between his aching jaw and his shoulder and hefts the club into his good hand.

There's a pause, followed by a hushed but aggravated noise and a bitten off swear, all tinny and thin over the line.

“I’ll try,” he says quickly when he hears it, not wanting to disappoint the stranger who’s promising him a rescue. He clenches fingers around the faux-leather grip.

"Lad, don't hurt yourself further," the man warns, and under his voice there's a faint but rhythmic clacking sound - like fingers flying over a keyboard. "I just want you to be prepared for the worst, Eggsy. Your step-father has quite the history of violence. We don't want you in the line of fire any more than you already have been."

 _"We?"_ Eggsy opens his mouth to ask, but that's the very same moment that his bedroom door caves in under Dean's weight, a large hole fracturing into the wood, a bloody fist punched through it. Fat, swollen fingers wrench the jagged pieces apart, blood smears trailing against the stark white paint of the door, and Dean shouts increasingly incoherent obscenities through he hole, each exclamation dappled with enthusiastic threats to Eggsy's life.

His mum sobs hysterically in the background, mixing with Daisy's miserable, frightened wails, and it's like the worst symphony of terror that Eggsy could only ever have imagined in his nightmares.

Dean shoves his entire arm through the opening he's made and starts groping towards the doorknob, and there's no way in hell that Eggsy can let him find it. He straightens up, phone slipping from its delicate perch and thumping to the carpet, and adjusts his grip on the driver before arcing it up and bringing it down, hard, across Dean's arm.

Dean positively _roars,_ ripping his arm back through to the other side and swearing up a blue streak, and compensates for this newest injury by throwing his shoulder against the broken door with a renewed vigor.

Eggsy clutches the golf club like a lifeline and stumbles backwards until the backs of his knees collide with his mattress and he loses his balance. He throws out his broken wrist without thinking, attempting to catch himself, and it only proceeds to make him crumble further inwards as searing pain blacks out his vision.

He curls into the best recovery position that he can manage, feet still planted on the ground and his nose mashed unpleasantly into his ever-bloodier blankets, the head of the driver digging unpleasantly into his sternum, and his lungs burn as he gasps for air. "'M sorry, mum," he bleats, drooling horribly out of the corner of his mouth, painting his teeth and lips with red.

Dean bashes into the door and falls halfway into Eggsy's room, snarling all the while. A small, shaking hand grips onto Eggsy's shoulder and he has to shut his eyes when his mum squeezes gently; a reassurance.

He remembers holding his mum's hand at his dad's funeral, both of their palms sweaty but neither letting go for anything in the world. He remembers her fingers, curled over his own death grip on the handlebars of his bicycle when she was teaching him how to ride. He remembers her sneaking into his room after the first time Dean ever raised a fist to him, her palms smoothing over his head and across his shoulders as she whispered apologies into his hair.

He remembers the painful clench of her hand around his as the doctors urged her to push, the way the nurse in her was careful to ensure he didn't include his pinky in the hold, lest she break his fingers by accident. Remembers the way her fingers trembled when she touched Daisy's face for the first time, and then his own for the millionth, pride shining out of her eyes.

He slips his good hand over hers, ignoring the awkward angle, and holds on tight even as his body gives up the ghost and his eyes slip shut, unwilling and unable to stay open any longer.

The voice on the other end of the phone shouts, indecipherable, from its place on the floor.

There's a loud, nearly deafening bang, and the unmistakeable sound of a door being busted off its hinges, and Eggsy steels himself for a deadly beating.

A second ticks past, and then another, and then there's a muffled shout and what seems to be several sets of feet storming forward. Dean lets loose a cry of rage that sounds as if it's getting further away, which makes no sense at all.

Eggsy musters up his little remaining energy and opens his eye into a slit, vision blurry and him seeing without any depth perception, but there's no mistaking the sight of Dean being dragged by two men in suits, backwards and out of the open flat door, kicking and screaming like an infant and not the monster he truly is.

Another figure takes Dean's place in the doorway, and Eggsy flinches back. His mum physically recoils; he can feel her whole body jerk with the motion, and the bald man in the doorway raises his arms in surrender.

In one hand, he has a clipboard.

"Eggsy," he says slowly, voice deep and rolling and so welcome that Eggsy lets out a whine. "It's me, alright? No need to be afraid, lad, I'm here to help."

"Mum," Eggsy manages, tongue heavy behind his teeth. "Daisy. Get 'em...safe. Please." He licks his lips. "Oxfords, not...not Brogues."

The stranger climbs carefully through the ragged disaster Dean has made of Eggsy's bedroom door, and treads toward them so slowly that it'd be hilarious under different circumstances. He kneels into the floor beside Eggsy's bed and takes a long, hard look at his bruised and bloodied face, at the blackened mess of his wrist and the ring of marks Dean left around his neck. His eyes flicker over to Michelle, gaze pausing briefly to examine the bruised line across her cheekbone and the puffiness around her eye, before he awards Daisy the same once over.

He redirects his look back to Eggsy, and there's something steely and protective about the line of his jaw when he takes a series of hard, deep inhales through his nose, like he needs to calm down.

"My name is Merlin," he says, and lays a careful hand against Eggsy's forearm. "I'm here to make sure you're safe, from here on out."

"Fuckin' _grand_ ," Eggsy slurs, and lets the world drop away into a blissful nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	2. two

 

 

 

Harry sits in the back of the lecture hall in the Harvard Geological Museum, and pinches the delicate skin of his inner wrist in an effort to stay awake. The young man slouched in the seat next to him, smelling faintly like marijuana and overwhelmingly of Old Spice, glances up from his scribbling doodles long enough to give Harry a knowing smirk.

He frowns and leans away from his commiserating neighbor, adjusting his position in the uncomfortable chair by uncrossing his legs and then recrossing them, fingers slipping into his cuffs and straightening out his sleeves as he does so. He turns all of his focus forward, to the front of the room, where James Arnold paces and passionately enumerates all the ways the modern world has failed in its preservation of the environment.

It is, in all honesty, a rather interesting and invigorating sermon, but one that’s lost its shine to Harry after the fourth viewing. This particular afternoon marks the seventh time that Harry’s endured Professor Arnold’s excitable oration, and considering how exhausted he is from trailing the man across New England in the States, it’s a bloody miracle he hasn’t fallen face first into the little fold-up tray attached to the chair.

He checks the time on his watch, and upon seeing that it’s the top of the hour, presses his fingers in on the dial and surreptitiously alerts Kingsman HQ to his position, as he’s meant to do every sixty minutes until he indicates to them that he’s set to retire for the evening. Blessedly, the time also indicates that the lecture is coming to a close, since Arnold rarely dithers on for longer than two hours, and chooses to have a voluntary question and answer seminar after a quarter hour long recess, meaning Harry only has a handful of minutes to escape listening to the same questions he’s heard asked in six other cities by now.

Sure enough, as soon as the minute hand ticks over to the twelve, Professor Arnold claps his hands together and beams around the room as his audience applauds. Harry applauds as well, though whether it’s for the Professor or out of sheer joy that the lecture is over, he can’t say.

He stretches his legs as he stands and, with a nod to the young man next to him, exits the row and walks through the door to the hall. After two hours of being caught in a room with nearly three hundred other people, the expansive space of the museum is a relief. He busies himself by wandering through the various exhibits, taking time to examine the fascinating Smith Meteorite Collection. Given the number of bodies that had trickled out of the lecture hall, he estimates that he has at least another hour to entertain himself in the museum before Arnold take his leave.

He counts it as something of a small victory that he only underestimates the timing by thirteen and a half minutes, and watches from across the street as Arnold bustles out of the building with a pleased smile on his face and hails a taxi back to his hotel.

Harry, already fully appraised of all the details of Arnold’s occupancy of said hotel (down to the combination on the hotel-issued safe where Arnold stashes his mobile, of all things), takes the time to savour the cup of coffee in his hands before tossing the empty cup into the garbage and flagging down a ride of his own.

He’s booked into the hotel that’s cater-cornered to the one where the Professor is staying, rooms perfectly aligned to guarantee Harry a glimpse into Arnold’s room through use of a telescope. For someone who locks his mobile into a damned safe, the man spends an alarming amount of time with his curtains open, heedless of anyone who might glance up and catch a show.

Harry steps into his own hotel room and sheds his jacket, careful to hang it up in order to avoid any unseemly creasing, and unlocks his suitcase. He runs his fingers along the fine fabric interior, tracing along the bones of the luggage until he finds a small, concave notch, and presses his thumb into it. The fingerprint scanner activates with a whir, and beeps twice in confirmation as his identity is verified. The interior of the suitcase gives a hiss as the false bottom rises slightly out of place, just enough that Harry can lift it up and away in order to retrieve his laptop.

Hotel safes, he thinks sagely, are really no reliable security measure. Neither are their electronic locks, he muses as he settles on the edge of the bed and opens his computer. The surveillance software flickers to life before his very eyes, indicating that Arnold has only just now entered his room and activated the bugs hidden discreetly about the place.

Harry removes his cufflinks as he listens to Arnold putter about his room, mumbling under his breath about ways to improve his lecture, scribbling down notes while he sits at the desk. There’s a small sigh, followed by a long silence, before there’s the click of buttons and a faint dial tone.

Harry sighs and toes off his shoes, settling in for the night as Arnold goes about ordering room service. He turns the television on to CNN and mutes it, letting the subtitles roll across the bottom of the screen instead. He loosens his tie as he crosses to the miniature refrigerator underneath the television set, using his key card to access the liquor that’s stashed inside. His nose wrinkles up as he takes in the paltry sampling, all of a lower quality than he’s become accustomed to as a result of his admittedly advantageous upbringing, but he swipes two little bottles of whiskey all the same.

He sets them on the small table next to his bed and fishes a small hearing device out of his pocket, setting it into his ear. He leans over the mattress and taps across the keyboard to establish the connection between the surveillance feed and the little earbud so that he can grab the ice bucket and toddle down the hall without missing any potential information.

He snorts to himself as he settles the bucket underneath the ice dispenser, watching the cubes tumble down. The idea that he could miss anything important seems, at this point, ridiculous, since Arnold appears to do little other than meticulously examine ways to improve his lecture or watch Fox News, because he’s apparently a masochist who enjoys yelling at syndicated bigots who have no hope of listening to reason.

Blessedly, this evening he seems to be in good spirits, since he’s doing neither of his usual activities and appears instead to have settled into his bed, chortling to himself as a film plays on in the background.

Harry reenters his own hotel room and slips three cubes of ice into a glass tumbler and then absentmindedly sets the bucket aside, head tilted as he tries to identify what it is that has Arnold so enthralled.

Faintly, in the background, he hears:

_“You can't shoot me! I have a very low threshold of death. My doctor says I can't have bullets enter my body at any time.”_

Ah, _Casino Royale_...the parody, not the gritty reboot. He can’t quite stop the smile that pulls up the corner of his lips as he raises his glass of whiskey to his mouth, pleasantly surprised. After a moment of consideration, rolling his tongue so that the alcohol can pool in the middle, he reaches for the remote and scrolls through the channel guide until he sees the title in question and hits ‘select.’

He manages to get through a quarter hour of the film, still muted but playing in faint stereo over the surveillance in Arnold’s room, before the sound of the Professor’s deep breathing takes a low and ragged turn into loud snores.

Harry winces and digs the little bud out of his ear, setting it on the side table before reaching over to his laptop and making a note of the time and Arnold’s current state of slumber. He also takes time to make note of his own plans to retire for the evening, alerting Kingsman HQ to the cessation of his own ‘incommunicado’ status for the day.

He’s barely withdrawn his hands from the keyboard before there’s an insistent ringing, a box popping up with an urgent request for a video conference with Merlin.

Harry frowns and turns off the television before accepting the call. “Good lord,” he says when the camera flickers on and Merlin’s solemn face fills up the screen. “You look like shit.”

Merlin heaves an aggravated sigh and rolls his eyes. “Cheers, you fucking bastard. See if you look all fresh and dandy after having the sort of day I’ve had.”

Harry hums sympathetically and takes another sip of his whiskey. “Recruits giving you a hard time then, old man?”

The look on Merlin’s face teeters across the line between ‘irritated’ and ‘withering,’ his expression one that screams quite clearly, _‘I’m three years your junior, you fucking git.’_

“Not quite,” he bites out. There’s a moment where he very visibly schools himself into a calmer demeanor, looking for all the world like he’s bracing himself to deliver some unpleasant news. “Harry,” he begins.

“Oh, Christ,” Harry mutters, setting his drink down with a loud ‘clink’ of glass against glass. “Not even using code names. This must be serious.”

“Harry,” Merlin grits out, and Harry forces himself to cease with the snarky comebacks, since his friend does actually seem to be in a great amount of distress. “Do you remember Lee Unwin?”

Harry is suddenly very glad that he’s set his drink to the side already, else it would have listed out of his suddenly numb fingers. “Of course I remember,” he says quietly, dropping his gaze to the side, unable to meet Merlin’s eyes. “How could I forget?”

Merlin makes an understanding noise in the back of his throat. Now that Lancelot - James - is gone, they’re the only two that have any understanding of what it meant to watch a promising young man throw himself onto a grenade for the sake of sparing three others. Merlin and Lee had actually grown quite close in his time at Kingsman training, sharing a comradery that Harry himself had never quite managed with his own recruit, despite his best efforts and his fervent belief that Lee had the potential to be the greatest Kingsman agent yet.

“And do you remember,” Merlin continues, his usual dry tone gentled. “Lee’s wife and son?”

Harry wishes desperately for the bed to open into a portal to the underworld and suck him down, if only to escape this conversation. He grimaces. “To be terribly honest with you, Merlin - and believe me when I say I’m not proud of this - I try not to.”

Harry has had to deliver his fair share of awful news, but the personal responsibility he feels for Lee’s death tends to fester into something writhing and rotten in his gut whenever he spares a moment to recall the way his own failings had torn a small family asunder.

“Well, it’s time to start,” Merlin spits, leaning towards the camera with a look of fierce unhappiness. “Seeing as how the Unwins have called in that favour you owed them.”

His tone, more than anything, catches Harry off guard. Merlin has a tendency to be dry and biting even when he’s in the most pleasant of spirits, but Harry’s never had the displeasure of experiencing his full and scathing ire before, and the feeling is enormously unpleasant.

Harry’s spine goes rigid when the words sink in. “What do you mean?” he demands, stomach sinking like a stone.

The way that Merlin immediately wilts is distressing. “Perhaps,” he says slowly, eyes focusing somewhere off-camera, fingers moving across his keypad, “it’s best if you see it for yourself.”

Another window pops up alongside the video conference, but this one contains an audio file that’s labeled G_UNWIN241114.mp3. With no small amount of trepidation, Harry clicks ‘play.’

There’s the tinny trill of a phone ringing twice before being picked up, and on the other line there’s the muffled and static sound of chaos and panic before a voice rasps into the recording.

_“Oxfords, not...please. It’s Eggsy Unwin, fuck, wait, Gary Unwin. Me step-dad, he’s gonna kill us, and I can’t call the fucking police because it’s never worked before and...Oxfords, not Brogues, please, my mum is hurt and my sister, she’s only a baby, I can’t let him hurt them, I can’t.”_

The voice sounds pained and young, and Harry has to close his eyes as he remembers a small child, solemnly playing with a snow globe as his mother sobs on the sofa. In the background, there’s a bang, loud enough even over the phone that it’s startling.

_“I’m gonna fuckin’ skin you alive, Muggsy!”_

“That’s the step-father, I presume?” Harry takes a moment to ask, pausing the recording for Merlin’s response.

“A nasty bugger if there ever were one,” Merlin tells him. “Keep listening.”

Harry presses play, and ragged breathing comes over the speakers.

 _“Shit. Oh, fucking_ **_cock_ ** _, please, the door won’t hold much longer and I…”_ The thick sound of a swallow, followed by a muffled cough. _“I’m...really not doing too well, to be honest. I’m a bit fucked.”_

There’s background chatter from the Kingsman side of the phone call, overlaid atop of the young man’s wheezing, as Amelia alerts Merlin to the severity of the situation and the call is transferred over to his personal communication line.

Harry listens, fingers curled into his palms and clenching ever-tighter as he listens to Merlin guide Lee’s son into finding any sort of defensive weapon, assuring him all the while that help is on its way and that he won’t abandon the boy to his own devices.

The way that Harry has.

There’s an enormous, splintering crash from over the phone before there’s a ‘thump’ and everything goes muffled and distant and indecipherable.

“He dropped the phone,” Merlin informs him, and takes away the audio file window only to replace it with a video file, a blurry image paused into place. “In order to attack his step-father.”

The video plays.

From the volume of Merlin’s voice over the speakers and the way the camera occasionally cuts down to the surface of a very familiarly looking clipboard, Harry gathers that this is his friend’s personal feed. Gawain and Bedivere stride quickly ahead of him, the lot of them maneuvering through a claustrophobic array of apartments that Harry remembers all too well.

They race up a series of tightly spaced stairs and to a familiar door. Even from the outside, there are clear sounds of distress and violence, and when Merlin takes a look from side to side, there’s an elderly neighbor standing a few doors down, looking on with concern.

Gawain levels a hard kick at the flimsy door, sending it flying open and causing the hinges to break out of the frame.

The front room is all at once familiar and strange to Harry, having inevitably changed over the course of seventeen years, but the little he can see of it is nothing like the neat little room that he remembers.

For one, there was no frothing, furious behemoth, bodily crashed halfway through a door the last time he was here.

Gawain and Bedivere stride forward and wrench the man’s arms backwards, ignoring his angry shouts and the way he tries to headbutt them into submission. He snarls into Merlin’s face as he’s dragged out of the flat, his face an unpleasant scene of rage and blood and bruises. Merlin’s feed watches for a moment as he’s dragged across the walkway and down the stairs, shouting nonsensical threats all the while.

The attention of the video returns to the wreckage of the small front room, flecks of blood spattered across the carpet and a broken coffee table at the centre of it all. The broken door becomes the focus next, and Harry gets his first look at the Unwins since he last left them, less than a week before Christmas, seventeen years before.

He inhales sharply at the sight of them, and almost simultaneously Lee’s wife and son flinch back violently on the screen.

Michelle is cradling a caterwauling infant in her arms, hair disheveled and her face bruised across one cheekbone, the neighboring eye swollen halfway shut.

Lee’s son - _Eggsy_ \- is a horrifying mess of blood and barely distinguishable features, for all that they’ve swollen and distorted, but there’s no mistaking the fierce look that comes over him when he registers Merlin’s presence.

 _"Eggsy,"_ Merlin says, voice slow and deep like he’s trying to tame a wild animal. There’s a barely audible whine of relief from the bed, and the lines of Eggsy’s body slump closer to the mattress. _"It's me, alright? No need to be afraid, lad, I'm here to help."_

 _"Mum,"_ Eggsy slurs. _"Daisy. Get 'em...safe. Please. Oxfords, not...not Brogues."_

“Christ,” Harry says violently, pausing the video once Merlin’s entered the room and he’s gotten a closer look at the extent of Eggsy’s injuries. A broken cheekbone, possibly a cracked eye socket given the extensive and lurid bruising and swelling, blood smeared across his face and into his hair and down his neck, painting rusty lines across the handprints around his throat. The hand that isn’t desperately clutching at a heavy looking golf club is fat and limp, splayed strangely against his side because his wrist is blackened and broken.

And _still_ , despite all of that, the boy’s first priority is still to his mum and sister.

Harry hears the echo of a memory. _Take care of it for me_ , he says to a solemn seven year old before glancing back at the devastated widow behind him. _And your mum._

How could he ever have imagined that the serious little nod he’d received in turn would lead to this?

“This is my fault,” he mutters, pulling his glasses off of his face and tossing them to the side. He pinches the bridge of his nose in an attempt to stall the headache that desperately wants to crash around inside of his skull. “Shit.”

“Easy, Harry,” Merlin says, and Harry could kiss him purely based on the fact that he finally removes the damned glasses feed from his laptop screen. His fierce expression has settled down into something that’s more understanding. Harry feels minutely foolish, getting so upset over the video when Merlin’s the one who had to witness this...this _fuckery_ , in person. “You’re not the one who raised their hand to the boy or his mother, after all.”

“No,” he concedes, rubbing a hand across his forehead as he settles back against the headboard. “But I suppose willful neglect is its own sort of terrible, isn’t it?”

“God, have you always been this bloody dramatic?” Merlin asks him rhetorically. He knots his fingers together and presses the pads of his thumbs against his chin, looking into the camera with a serious expression. “Harry, listen, not to say it wouldn’t have been better to have popped in on the Unwins from time to time, but what’s done is done. We can’t know if your presence in their lives would have exacerbated things, besides. From what I recall you telling me, Michelle Unwin was fairly adamant about not wanting help from us.”

“Until now,” Harry murmurs.

Merlin sits back into his chair, hands unraveling so that he can splay his palms outward, towards the screen. “Until now,” he agrees.

Harry reaches off to the side and picks up his glasses, fiddling with the frames before slipping them up the bridge of his nose. “Where are they now?”

“Well,” Merlin begins, attention diverted to a spot off-camera, which Harry assumes is another monitor that has all of the pertinent information on display. “Gawain accompanied Eggsy to the hospital, though his report has consisted of little more than updates on the boy’s continued state of unconsciousness, and the doctor’s report of the extent of his injuries.” There’s a series of quick taps and a small ‘ping’ as a copy of Gary “Eggsy” Unwin’s medical chart appears in a window on Harry’s laptop.

He quickly surveys the list and feels his face become more and more pinched with every broken bone and documented bruise.

“As for Michelle Unwin and her daughter, Bedivere has accompanied them to visit their new accommodations.”

“A safe house?” Harry asks, still perusing Eggsy’s medical chart with a sort of morbid curiosity. Broken eye socket, just as he’d feared, but it’s thankfully just a hairline indirect orbital floor fracture, meaning that the physician won’t need to perform any sort of reconstructive surgery. Antibiotics and ice packs should do the trick, for that injury at least.

He’s so busy musing to himself that he doesn’t realise for a decent amount of time that Merlin has yet to respond. He tears himself away from the chart and looks to his friend, who appears to be actually physically uncomfortable, tapping a pen wildly against the palm of his hand. Harry’s eyes narrow. “Where have you placed the Unwins?” he asks, pointed and slow.

Merlin blows out an aggravated sigh. “In James’ old home,” he bites out finally, and shifts in his chair.

“What,” Harry says. It’s not really a question.

“Three doors down from yours,” he adds, adjusting his glasses on his face.

“I’m well aware of that fact,” Harry says, and greatly resists the urge to bang his head against the wall. It wouldn’t do to disturb the neighbors. “Weren’t we going to award that home to the newest Lancelot recruit?”

Merlin snorts unattractively, rolling his eyes. “You and I both know that any one of those privileged little shits could afford their own home in the mews. Two, even. I think the Unwins are a great deal more deserving, don’t you?”

Harry’s eyes flicker over to the macabre smattering of words that remind him of just how terribly he failed the Unwins by keeping them at a distance. He thinks about the way Michelle Unwin had looked, curled protectively around an innocent infant and an ugly bruise covering half of her face; he thinks about the difference between the sombre seven year old he left behind with a clasp on the shoulder and nary a glance back, and the poor battered body sprawled across a blood soaked bedspread.

“You know,” Harry says, warming to the idea suddenly and with fervor. “Sometimes, Merlin, you are quite clever.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Merlin tells him, and ends the call.

Harry sits in the silence of his hotel room, staring speculatively at the television without actually watching, even as _Casino Royale_ begins again on an encore. The Unwins, only three doors away, with the entire power of the Kingsman standing behind them. And Harry himself, who’s going to be damned sure to make up for all of the years lost and all the wrongs done to the Unwins in that time.

A smile begins to work the corners of his mouth upwards. He leans over and pulls open the drawer in the bedside table, extricating a moleskine notebook and a fountain pen. Harry closes his laptop and sets the open moleskine on top of the hard exterior, and uncaps the pen.

In his mind, he formulates the barest bones of a plan.

He sets the ink to paper, and gets to work.

 

ooo

 

If there’s one thing that Harry has learned about himself during his tenure as a Kingsman agent, it’s that he’s not one to shy away from confrontation. He sees it as a strength, in fact, but Merlin frequently and ardently disagrees with him and often swears at him for what he refers to as “bullheaded stubbornness.”

He’s unflinchingly stared down the barrel of a gun more times than is probably considered sane, hasn’t hesitated to rush towards a knife-wielding assailant if he thinks he can manipulate the fight to his advantage, and has stood on the thin precipice of a building’s edge at least a dozen times, and the only thought that’s gone through his mind all the while is that the breeze up there is actually a bit bracing and refreshing.

He’s faced down his own mortality every time he’s been sent out on a mission, and has been so assured of his own capability that even he must admit that his cockiness frequently borders on reckless stupidity.

He’s the top Kingsman agent at the current Round Table, a fact that he feels ridiculous reminding himself of as he peers out the curtain of his front window, watching like a nosy git as Michelle Unwin, baby on her hip, directs a small group of movers where to place her family’s meagre belongings.

He’d meant to go across and (re)introduce himself to her, but that was twenty minutes ago, and still here he putters, hiding behind the bloody curtains like a damned fool.

He curls his hand around the doorknob and takes a deep breath.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he murmurs, disgusted with himself when a moment passes and he’s made no further movements. He throws his hands up and paces along the hall, fingers clenched angrily about his waist. “Fifty years old and I’m hiding from a perfectly decent woman because, what, she might be cross with me?” He shakes his head, irritated. “Man up,” he hisses to himself, and then throws the door open with perhaps too much force.

It bangs against the door stop and shudders in its frame.

If subtlety was what he was hoping for in his first personal encounter with Michelle Unwin in seventeen years, he’s failed miserably. She’s staring over in his direction, visibly startled, and even her small daughter is peering over at him with interest, mouthing adorably on her teething ring.

“Hello,” he says feebly, stepping across the threshold. He closes the door, _delicately_ , behind him, and smoothens his hands down the front of his suit jacket. He clears his throat. “Hello,” he says again, much more firmly, and takes carefully paced strides towards the pair of them. “Terribly sorry, couldn’t help but notice you’re moving into the neighborhood. I live a few doors down,” he gestures needlessly to the door from whence he’s just emerged, “and I thought it might do to introduce myself. My name is - ”

“I know who you are,” Michelle interrupts coolly, gazing at him with narrowed eyes and a hard set to her mouth. “It’s a bit hard to forget the bloke who comes to your house two days before Christmas to tell you your husband’s dead.”

“Harry...Hart,” he finishes weakly, extended hand falling to his side. Michelle raises an eyebrow at him. Daisy lets out a small raspberry noise around her teething ring, drool dripping down in shining rivulets across her fingers. He shifts on his feet, feeling ill at ease very suddenly. “Mrs. Unwin - ”

“Michelle,” she interrupts, tone brooking no arguments. He must be giving her some sort of astonished look, because her own stony gaze softens a bit. She shrugs at him and simultaneously adjusts her grip on the baby, moving her higher up onto her hip. “It’s the least I owe you, innit?” she asks, diverting her gaze towards her little one, brushing the downy hair off of her forehead. “After the way I treated you last, and after…” she swallows, eyes flicking back to him before she looks to the pavement. “After everything you’ve done for us,” she adds softly, something like shame coloring the words.

Harry feels wretched and wrong, like an utter bastard, but attempts a weak smile through the nausea in his gut. “Not enough, I’m afraid,” he admits. “And far too late.”

She rolls her eyes and tuts at him, acting for all the world like she’s willing to sweep everything stale and unpleasant between them under the rug. “You saved my boy,” she says, and then again, more fiercely. “ _You saved my boy_ . Giving him that medal, the way you done...it’s good you did. It’s _good_ , cos if you had gone and left it in my hands I would have…” she shakes her head and lets out a choked, awful little laugh. She clutches the baby more tightly to her chest. “I would have chucked it, you get me?” she demands, meeting Harry’s gaze dead on despite the water-logged misery in her own eyes. “I would’ve binned it, just to spite you, and then where would I be? At another funeral instead of a brand new house? You see? Giving Eggsy that medal, that was more than you needed to do, and you saved his _life._ ”

“I can’t take all the credit,” is all Harry thinks to say, feeling for once in his life, utterly overwhelmed. “I daresay my...associates, did far more of the rescuing than I.”

“You saved him,” she insists, and reaches out to squeeze his forearm. “You saved my family, Mr. Hart. I s’pose it’s only fair of me to let the past be the past, yeah?” She squeezes at his arm again, but this time there’s a cautious little smile on her face to accompany it. “It’s the neighborly thing to do, innit?”

“If you need anything,” Harry blurts, and reaches out with his own hand to cover the one she has laid across his forearm. “Anything at all. A cup of sugar.”

“Seein’ as how you made quite the entrance,” she says drily, and pats his arm. “I know just where to find you.” She pulls her hand back and uses both of her arms to heft Daisy a bit higher before leaning up onto the balls of her feet and pressing a dry kiss to his cheek, and he feels it for the gesture of gratitude for which she intends it. “Now, if you don’t mind, this one has a nappy that needs changing, and I need to get Eggsy’s room sorted before he’s released from hospital.”

“Might I offer a hand?” Harry asks her, still feeling bewildered but oddly eager to help as immediately as possible, given her improbably extended olive branch. “I’ve been told I have an unnatural knack for organisation.”

She awards him with another small smile, but shakes her head and takes a step towards her front door. “Nah,” she demurs, and tilts her head down to the end of the street. Harry follows her gaze and sees two young men in their early twenties sauntering down the pavement, hands tucked into their jackets and elbows jostling together as they wave a greeting to Michelle. “Eggsy’s managed to keep company with two good ones, after all.”

She turns back to Harry and gives him a once over. “Come over for tea on Friday,” she says, and Harry gets the feeling that it’s more of an insistence than an offer. “Eggsy’s coming home from hospital tomorrow, but he’s going to need a few days rest to get in working order before he’ll be up to seeing strangers.”

Harry bites back the reminder that he’s not precisely a stranger, and nods instead, and lets her turn back to her house. “Tea,” he agrees, and raises a hand in farewell as he turns back to his own doorway, turning back just after crossing the threshold. “And other neighborly things.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Hart,” she dismisses him, not unkindly and with a gentle shooing motion.

“Call me Harry,” he says, and pulls his front door shut behind him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was hand to god so close to making this fic a ghost au where the unwins move into harry's house instead and eggsy realizes there's a dapper ghost skulking about in the corners and banging angrily on the walls whenever he talks shit about the stuffed dog in the toilet
> 
> but I went with the more realistic-to-canon route bc reasons??? but I'm not ruling out the ghost au completely but maybe another time u kno
> 
> also everything re: harry's assignment tailing Arnold will be resolved in a chapter or two :o)


	3. three

The sweet bliss of unconsciousness takes Eggsy not long after the stranger who calls himself ‘Merlin’ makes his dramatic entrance, but it doesn’t manage to keep him clasped in its warm embrace for long. He drifts in and out of the muddled haze that shrouds him, pain both bringing him up and sending him back under all at once. Years of having a mum as a nurse tells him that this is probably for the best, considering the number of blows to the head he sustained in his fight with Dean, but all the logic in the world can’t stop the frustrated tears that leak from his eyes whenever he swims back up into consciousness. 

His surroundings change with every blink of his eyes - eye, rather, considering the right one is swollen shut and fucking aching. There’s the familiar peeling paint of his bedroom ceiling, his mum sniffling as she runs careful fingers through his hair, the strands tacky with blood. The steady, rolling movement of a stretcher underneath him as he moves past the ugly yellow smoke stains Dean caused at the edges of the wall paper in their front room. The world outside, light grey and chilled in the January air, the cold of it a balm against his body. 

His brain doesn’t seem to be able to pick a singular area of pain to focus on, moving its concentration from his head to his throat, down to his ribs to his wrist and back again in some sort of agonising cycle, which is why he thinks he may actually be hallucinating when he’s loaded into the back of a bloody taxi.

“A cab?” he slurs, and when they’re done shining a light into his eyes and checking for a concussion - which, by some miracle, they deem him not to have - he carefully rolls his head to give Merlin the most scathing glower he can manage. “Who th’fuck  _ are _ you lot?”

There’s a brief pinprick of pain in the wrist that isn’t mangled, accompanied by a grim look from the bald man as he ushers Michelle and Daisy into the back of the car. “Rest, Eggsy,” he says in lieu of an answer, and moves his gaze back to the clipboard in his hand. His fingers fly nonsensically across the surface, like he’s using a touchscreen tablet. 

“Prick,” Eggsy mumbles, before the drugs they’ve injected into his system drag him down into a glorious stupor. 

 

 

ooo

 

 

Waking up, this time, is significantly harder with the drugs still bogging down his system and his body begging him to go back to sleep and let it rest a while longer. It’s only through innate stubbornness that he manages to shake off the last dredges of the fogginess surrounding him, and blinks his good eye rapidly to clear it of sleep. There’s a cool, heavy compress draped across the right side of his face, and when he tries to lift his right hand to prod at it, he can feel the familiar weight of a fibreglass cast wrapped around his forearm.

Before he can even manage to get his fingers off the bed, though, there’s the gentle press of a hand against his bicep, keeping his arm from moving. It speaks to his state of exhaustion - or maybe the morphine pumping through his system, holy  _ shit _ \- that the pressure is more than enough to still him. 

Wincing and grinding his teeth together, he slowly turns his head so that he can see who’s touching him. The angle’s a bit awkward, and he can see the slope of his own nose in his peripheral, but there’s no mistaking that the person perched in a plush looking chair next to his bed is a total stranger.

“Easy,” the man says, grinning at him like he’s genuinely pleased to see Eggsy awake, despite the fact that he’s never seen this man in his life. “It wouldn’t do to strain yourself, Eggsy.”

“Who’re you?” He rasps, then swallows around the painful scrape the words leave behind in his throat. A small cup filled with ice chips and water appears before him, straw pointed towards his mouth, and it’s with a wary sort of gratefulness that he accepts it. The first sip of water, soothing and quenching, seems like something that would reduce him to tears if he weren’t in the company of a stranger.

“I’m the one who’s been tasked with making sure your arse stays in this bed,” the man informs him cheerfully, showing a bright hint of teeth when he grins. He settles back into his chair and adjusts the sleeves of his light grey suit, the motion casual but practiced in a way that’s completely foreign to Eggsy and his Adidas clothing. 

“That ain’t an answer,” he informs the man, and it comes out petulant and dour, but even his rotten little pique makes the stranger chuckle. 

“Rhys,” he says after a moment, and gives a small wave from where his hands are clasped together over his crossed legs. “My name is Rhys. I would shake your hand, but, all things considered...doesn’t seem like the best course of action.” His eyes sparkle a bit in the bright hospital lighting when Eggsy snorts in agreement. “I work with friends of your father,” he says next, and his tone is more gentle, and oddly almost reverent. “I was part of the team that came to your flat when you called.”

Eggsy has a brief flash of memory, of watching two men - one fair and willowy and the other with a dark-skinned complexion and broad shoulders - hauling a screaming, spitting Dean out through the wreckage of their front door, getting a shot in at the face of the latter while he lashed out and struggled.

There’s a thin line of scabbing at the bridge of Rhys’ nose that speaks to only the hint of any wound, and Eggsy lifts his left hand to gesture at his own before pointing to the man. “Sorry ‘bout that,” he murmurs.

Rhys’ smile seems to dim a bit at that. “It’s not your fault,” he says firmly. “Why should you be sorry?”

Eggsy lifts his shoulders into a tiny approximation of a shrug. “Dean,” he says shortly, as if the name itself is all the explanation needed.

Something in the other man’s eyes seems to steel a bit, goes flinty at the mention. “Mr. Baker can - and will be - held accountable for his own actions, Eggsy,” he says, leaning forward to perch his elbows on his knees and give Eggsy a serious, considering once over. “You’ve no need to apologise for his actions.”

Eggsy sighs through his nose and tilts his head away, giving his straining eye muscle a reprieve. “Fifteen years of habit,” he says. “Bit hard to break. Ain’t nobody gonna apologise for him anyway, ‘sides me and my mum. She don’t deserve that.”

“And neither do you,” Rhys says, tone leaving no room for argument despite how Eggsy wants badly to disagree. He’s glad he’s got his one eye turned away and the other shrouded under an ice pack, because it all serves to hide the way tears are rising, unbidden, at this small show of kindness.

Neither of them say a word for what seems to be an endlessly uncomfortable span of time, but in reality is only about five minutes. Rhys clears his throat eventually, breaking the silence, and Eggsy hears the rustle of clothing as he stands, chair screeching gently backwards. He crosses to the foot of the bed, where Eggsy can see him more clearly without having to strain his good eye or his poor, abused neck, and it’s a small kindness that doesn’t help the tight, emotional knot that’s building in his chest.

“What your father did for my colleagues,” he says, voice still low and serious but not unkind. “Indebts us to you and yours. What you’ve done for your mum and sister...protecting them as you’ve done, using that favour so unselfishly, Eggsy, marks you as someone special. Someone of  _ worth _ . You don’t deserve blame for any of this, and I won’t have you heap it on yourself because we refuse to.” He reaches out and jostles Eggsy’s ankle briefly, bright smile lighting up his face again. “And if I hear it from you again, I’ll put you right back in this bed myself.” He winks.

Eggsy’s a bit blindsided by it, if he’s honest. “Bruv,” he tries, croaking and shifting on the bed in discomfort. “I ain’t nothing or no one that special.”

“You are,” Rhys says, and his words hold a confidence that seems almost impossible. Eggsy doesn’t quite understand what’s happening here, doesn’t know how someone he’s only held a fifteen minute long conversation with can be so assured in his convictions of Eggsy’s character that he’s lecturing him on his own self worth. He stays quiet, jaw clenched as stubbornly as his poor face can manage, until Rhys sighs.

He pulls a mobile out from his jacket pocket and taps something out across the screen for a moment or two before slipping it back into the inner confines of the suit, and then pulls out something else. It takes a moment for Eggsy to realise that it’s a marker, of all things, and Rhys crosses back to the chair and settles down. He uncaps the marker and leans over the stark white of Eggsy’s cast, marker poised with intent.

“What’re you doing?” He asks, even though it’s fairly obvious. 

“How do you feel about robots?” Rhys asks, already scribbling something onto the cast that Eggsy can’t quite manage to make out from this angle, what with his limited depth perception.

“You always carryin’ markers round like that?”

“Hmm?” Rhys asks, looking up from where he’s very studiously drawing a line across the middle of the cast. “Oh.” He waggles the marker between his fingers for a second before setting the tip back down to continue his work. “I had a brief stint as a chef, if you can believe it. An old habit, hard to break, but comes in handy sometimes. At least it’s not my fountain pen,” he says, grinning up at Eggsy like that makes a damn bit of sense. “Now, stop fidgeting, you’re mucking up my lines.” He picks up the telly remote and deposits it on Eggsy’s lap with a pointed look.

Eggsy grumbles, but picks up the control and finds a program to watch while his apparent companion scribbles. They sit in a relatively comfortable silence, no sound between them except the scratch of a marker on fibreglass and Craig Charles’ hysterical narration of  _ Takeshi’s Castle _ , until the morphine drip’s scheduled dosage pulls Eggsy under once again. 

 

 

ooo

 

 

When he wakes up next, there are significantly more people in his hospital room than there were when he went to sleep. The room itself, being unendingly and almost painfully posh, is certainly big enough to fit them all, but the volume of their chatter is still jarring when Eggsy stirs awake and opens his eye. 

Head listing off to the left as it is, his mum is the first person he sees. She’s curled into a large, comfortable looking armchair, sans shoes and socked feet tucked under herself as she flips through a magazine with one hand. The other, Eggsy notices as he follows the line of her arm, is carefully clasped around his own. He squeezes, gently, and her head shoots up. The magazine plops to the floor, forgotten, as she lurches to her feet and bends over him. Her lips find his forehead and peppers it with a series of soft, relieved kisses, hands soothing gently and carefully across his head. 

“My love,” she whispers, and presses her nose into his temple. “Oh, babe, it’s so good to see you open your eyes.”

“Mum,” is all he can manage, fingers curling into the bottom hem of her jumper. “You alright?”

She gives a wet sounding chuckle, one that’s simultaneously pained and relieved. “Never better,” she whispers, and kisses him on top of his head. They take a moment to luxuriate in the comfort of each other’s embrace, before she whispers, “There’s someone who’s been missin’ you a whole lot, love.”

Almost on cue, there’s an excited little cry from the other side of the room. “Eh!” Daisy shouts, which is as close to his name as she can manage. She strains towards him where she’s perched on Rhys’ lap across the room, a book open on his knees but utterly forgotten when she realises that Eggsy is awake. “Eh!”

Seeing his little sister, so gorgeously unmarred by the events of his fight with Dean, makes Eggsy’s chest knot up fiercely. “Oh, Dais,” he whispers, and starts to lift his arms to gesture for her as Rhys hefts her into his arms and approaches. A weight keeps his right arm pinned to the mattress, and when he looks over, it’s to the sight of Ryan and Jamal perched next to him, an array of coloured markers spread across the mattress in front of them, alternately giving him glances and looking back down to where they’re colouring on his cast.

Daisy’s set into the crook of his uninjured arm, and she takes the chance to immediately plant both of her little hands on his chest and lurch upwards, smearing a messy kiss onto his chin. It’s achingly adorable, and Eggsy is so full with love for her that he could burst, but it also puts a strain on his cracked ribs and he can’t quite suppress the pained grunt that escapes him.

His mum pulls Daisy off of him but keeps her close enough that he can reach out to her, two chubby hands curling around his index and middle fingers as she trills excitedly. 

Rhys settles back into the loveseat - a bloody loveseat in a fucking  _ hospital room _ , Christ, who were these people that they could afford all this - giving Eggsy a salute as he leans back to give them their space. Eggsy gives him a nod in greeting.

“More pink, mate,” Ryan urges from his side, elbowing Jamal. “It ain’t a proper unicorn ‘less it’s got a pink mane.”

“The fuck’re you to tell me about unicorns,” Jamal scoffs, but reaches for an offensively bright pink marker all the same. He gives a guilty glance towards Michelle and Daisy, but his mum seems to be too happy to see Eggsy awake and lets the swear slide past without comment, but not without a pointed look.

“What are you doing to me arm?” Eggsy demands, tilting his head and leaning over to finally get a look at what Rhys had drawn. “Is that Godzilla fighting a giant horse?”

“Unicorn,” Ryan corrects with relish, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he colours in what appears to be a tall building on fire. “A robot unicorn.”

Eggsy raises an eyebrow at Rhys, who’s staring down at his phone with a smile, thumbs flying across the screen. Everyone’s attention is drawn towards the door a second later when the knob twists and another new-but-familiar face enters the room.

“Ah, Eggsy,” Merlin says, shutting the door behind him, and he sounds pleased to see him awake. Eggsy can’t help but straighten up in bed at his presence, something about the man commanding his full attention. By the way Rhys rises to his feet, hands clasped behind his back, he certainly isn’t the only one. Merlin comes to stand at the end of the bed, arms crossed over his clipboard as he holds it to his stomach. “How are you feeling, lad?”

“Yeah, good,” Eggsy says, licking his lips and nodding once. 

Merlin’s eyebrows rise swiftly upwards and he gives Eggsy a wry look over the rim of his glasses. “‘Good’,” he repeats, and gives a long look towards his clipboard. “You’ve got a fractured eye socket, a broken wrist,  _ three  _ cracked ribs, extensive bruising on your larynx. Not to mention more than a dozen lacerations and your fair share of nasty hematomas, and you’re  _ ‘good’. _ ”

“...yeah?” Eggsy says, shrugging a single shoulder. His mum’s hand found his again sometime during the laundry list of all his injuries that Merlin aired out, thumb smoothing over his pulse point as if she’s trying to remind himself that he’s really there. He glances over and gives her as reassuring a look as he can manage around all the bandages on his face. "Had worse, haven't I?"

Merlin continues to stare at him before huffing out a quick laugh and shaking his head. “Another one,” he mutters, and traces his fingers in quick motions across the clipboard. “God help me.”

Rhys clears his throat behind Merlin and when the taller man turns to face him, he gives him some sort of significant look - head tilted at an angle, eyes cast to the side with brows raised up - and they appear to share a silent conversation that lasts only seconds before the full brunt of their attentions are on Eggsy once again. 

“When you’re feeling up to it,” Merlin says. “We would like to discuss the matter of your new accommodations.”

Eggsy and his mum share a look, Daisy babbling happily between them as she plays with Michelle’s necklace. “What about the flat?” she asks, furrowing her brows and frowning towards them. 

They visibly hesitate, the both of them casting sideways glances towards where Ryan and Jamal are using Eggsy as a human colouring book.

“Oi,” Eggsy says, irritation welling up inside of him. “They’s good as family, alright? Nothin’ you say to me or Mum can’t be said to them.”

Rhys scrubs a hand down his face and gives Merlin a small, one shouldered shrug when he turns to look at him, as if to gauge his opinion of Eggsy’s statement. “Very well,” he sighs, sounding put upon, and turns to address the lot of them in their entirety. “It seems our arrest of Mr. Dean Anthony Baker turned up several...unsavory businesses, all of which it seems he had his fingers in. I’m afraid that Scotland Yard has taken an interest in Mr. Baker and all of his known associates, and your flat has been sanctioned off as evidence in their ongoing investigation. We’ve managed to pull a few strings and get most of your belongings removed, but there’s only so much we can do. In the meantime, we’ve an available company-owned residence that belonged to a colleague of ours who, unfortunately, passed away last month. You’ll be safe there from anyone who might try to contact Mr. Baker through you.”

“How can you be sure?” Michelle asks, voice small and nervous. Eggsy squeezes at her hand. 

“We have our ways,” Merlin says vaguely, giving the least helpful answer that Eggsy has ever heard in his entire life. “Rest assured, you’ve nothing to worry about.” He comes around the side of the bed and reaches out, cupping Eggsy’s shoulder beneath his hand and squeezing firmly, and something about the gesture, or perhaps the confident look that accompanies it, is so reassuring that the nervous feeling in Eggsy’s gut settles. 

“Alright,” he agrees, still clutching his mother’s hand tightly. “When do we move in?”

Merlin removes his hand with a pointed look. “ _ You  _ aren’t going anywhere for another week, young man. Not until those ribs have had a chance to rest, and certainly not before the doctor is sure your eyesocket has no risk of infection. Consider yourself on bedrest.”

“Fuck,” Eggsy mutters, dropping his head back against the pillow. “I ain’t ever been good at staying still.”

“Not to worry,” Rhys pipes up, and reaches over the barrier at the end of the bed to prod Eggsy in the arch of his foot. He jerks it away with a scowl. “You’re bound to get lots of visitors in the next few days. Quite a few blokes at the shop interested in meeting the infamous Eggsy. With that cast of characters, you’ll hardly be bored.”

A thought occurs to Eggsy suddenly; a question he hasn’t yet thought to ask. “What kind of shop is this again?” He asks, giving a pointed look around the posh hospital suite. 

“A tailor,” Merlin says, quelling whatever Rhys was opening his mouth to say with a withering look. “On Savile Row.”

Jamal takes a break from shading Godzilla to give a low whistle. “Shit, bruv, you must be rollin’ in it.”

Merlin’s mouth ticks upwards. “We do quite well,” he says. “Certainly well enough to provide for those who deserve it. Now, Michelle, if you don’t mind, I’d care for your input on certain aspects of your new home. I’m afraid its last tenant had a...curious sort of taste when it came to interior decorating.”

He taps at the clipboard and turns it around, showing them the tablet-like screen that encompasses the other side, and on display is the most garish, horribly furnished room Eggsy’s ever seen in his fucking life. “Is that...a red and purple shag carpet?” His mum asks, sounding only slightly strangled. Eggsy’s amazed that that’s the only thing she’s focused on, given the frankly terrifying modern art hanging on the wall, above what looks like a sofa made of golden hued leather. 

“Garish, I know,” Merlin says, turning the clipboard back to himself and frowning down at the screen. “Not to worry. We’ve gutted the house of all its...unique attributes, and merely need your input on how to proceed with making it more of a home for your family.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Michelle starts to argue, shaking her head. “It’s...it’s too much, what with all you’ve done for us already.”

“It’s exactly what you deserve,” Merlin says, firm and gentle all at once. Michelle looks away from his open, honest gaze and looks to Eggsy with wide eyes. He gives a helpless shrug; he’s loathe to feel like someone’s charity case, but he doesn’t honestly get the feeling that’s the intention behind all of their actions. A selfish part of him, hidden in a darker recess of his mind, agrees; for all the shit they’ve been through, from his dad’s death to the appearance of Dean in their lives and all the destruction and unhappiness he wrought, they deserve a good thing, the three of them.

His mum gives him a sad little smile, like she can read his thoughts, and she reaches up to brush the backs of her fingers over his cheek. “All right,” she whispers, first to him, and then again to Merlin with more confidence. “All right.”

Merlin nods, not quite smiling but looking pleased all the same. “I’ll make arrangements for you to meet with a friend of the company who will be more than happy to help you.” He inclines the upper half of his body towards them in a small bow, and when he straightens up he gives Rhys a significant sort of look, and together they exit the room, door clicking shut behind them.

“Bruv,” Jamal says, capping his marker and raising his eyebrows at Eggsy once the sound of expensive shoes on hospital flooring has faded away. “You sure you ain’t sellin’ your soul or summat? Cos if you are, you should throw in for a Lambo.”

“Nah,” Ryan says, still bent over and scribbling messily into the illustration of an explosion. “Lambo’s are shit, man, go for a Bugatti.”

“Boys,” Michelle chides, shifting Daisy in her arms as she stands from the armchair. Ryan and Jamal’s humour quells under the disapproving look she levels them with. “Honestly.” She waits a moment for their mumbled, half-hearted apologies before winking conspiratorially. “Get an Aston Martin, babe. A proper Bond car.”

“I love you, Mum,” Eggsy tells her with a fervent honesty, and the warmth of her smile soothes his aches more effectively than any medicine.

 

 

ooo

 

 

“I’ve met our new neighbor,” his mum announces a week later, walking into his hospital room and pushing Daisy ahead of her in a pram that Eggsy’s certain they didn’t possess two days ago when she’d last brought his sister by. She pauses, a few paces into the room, and gives him a disapproving scowl when she sees where he’s seated. “Oi! What’d the doctor say about getting out of bed?”

Eggsy sinks a bit further into the back of the plush recliner, thumbing at the ‘start’ button on the Xbox controller clutched in his hands. Ryan and Jamal very studiously look straight ahead, slumping guiltily into their own chairs like Michelle might not notice them if they slouch far enough. “Erm,” he says, squinting up at her with his un-bandaged eye. “To...not? But, mum - ”

“No ‘buts’, Eggsy!” She lets out a frustrated, aggravated noise and deposits Daisy carefully into Jamal’s lap. “Babe, you’re never going to be cleared to go home if you keep actin’ up like this!”

“Mum,” Eggsy tries again. 

She doesn't appear to hear him, or is willfully ignoring his attempts at placating her, because she aggressively throws back the covers of the hospital bed and starts thumping at the pillows with vigor. "I swear, Eggsy, you'd jump off the top of the bloody Eye if only cos someone told you you shouldn't!" 

"Mum!" Eggsy says, raising his voice as much as he can manage around the still considerable bruising of his throat. "Hey, yeah? Cleared me this morning, didn't they? Doctor said he'd ring you!"

Michelle scoffs, circling the bed until she’s standing in front of him, and plants her hands firmly on her hips. “I’ve had my mobile on all day, young man, and no one’s tried to ring me even once.”

“Did you let Daisy play with it, Ms. B? Sorry, Michelle,” Ryan says, slinking further into his seat and holding his hands up when she gives him a withering look, jaw cocked off dangerously to the side. “It’s just, she always messes with me ringer when she gets her hands on it. Puts it on silent or up all the way, as she might’ve done to you, is all I’m sayin’!”

Michelle lets out another irritated huff of air, displacing the errant strands of hair that have started drifting out of the plait on the back of her head only to curve around her face. “Would have noticed, wouldn’t I?” she asks, even as she digs into her purse for her mobile. “She’s only a baby, she can’t - oh.” She frowns down at her mobile, ears tinting to a rouge while she stares at the dark screen. “Oh, damn it.”

“Turned if off, didn’t she?” Ryan asks, with the tone of someone who’s all too familiar with Daisy’s antics. Michelle shoots a look at him out of the corner of her eye, one that’s half embarrassed and half scowl. The screen, when it flickers back to life, illuminates her face in an unearthly white-blue glow, and it only serves to highlight the exhaustion that’s bruising up beneath her eyes. Eggsy feels a new type of ache on top of all his others.

She lifts the mobile to her ear and spends a few moments listening to a distant, mumbling tone as it rattles on over her voicemail, and hangs up with a sigh. 

“Sorry, babe,” she says, and leans forward to carefully kiss Eggsy on the top of his head. “Can’t help but worry.”

“It’s alright, mum,” Eggsy says, catching her hand as it drops from its careful clasp over his shoulder. He gives her a lopsided grin, ignoring the way the right side of his face protests at the movement. “So, new neighbor, aye? They’re fit, I hope.”

Michelle rolls her eyes and stoops to save Jamal from Daisy, who’s got her hands clamped firmly on his ears and is tugging them with the manic sort of glee reserved for all toddlers. “I’m surprised these two ain’t told you about him yet,” she says, bouncing her daughter on her hip and looking pointedly between Eggsy’s friends. “They seen him as well, haven’t they?”

“Not really,” Jamal defends when Eggsy turns to heave an accusatory look his way. He’s rubbing at his ears. “We was only coming round the block when we seen him, and he fucked off - sorry, erm... _ went back _ into his house ‘fore we could get a proper deeks, didn’t he?”

“Tall, though,” Ryan pipes up, now that he’s done trying to merge with his chair and no longer fearing Michelle’s wrath. “Posh as hell, but you’re kickin’ off to live in the fucking  _ Stanhope Mews _ , ain’t ya? Bastard.”

“Older bloke, it seemed,” Jamal adds, picking up his Xbox controller and using it to turn off the console. 

“You’ve met him once before,” Michelle adds, in a tone more subdued than one she’s used thus far. She shifts on her feet when Eggsy peers up at her, curiosity piqued. “He’s the one who gave you the medal.”

Something knots up tightly inside of Eggsy’s chest, right below where the medal in question lays against his breastbone, warm from the heat of his skin. He’d only been seven back then, and the memory of the day is blurry and washed out from the years that have passed, but he can recall a kind smile.

A hand, gently reaching out to turn over the snow globe in his hands. Soft words and a promise sworn, and that same hand reaching out to clasp his shoulder before the man - the tallest man Eggsy had ever seen - swept out the door and out of their lives. 

“I invited him to dinner,” Michelle says, perching herself on the loveseat across from where Eggsy, Ryan, and Jamal have stationed themselves. 

“What,” Eggsy asks, nose wrinkling up in confusion. “Tonight? Mum, I’m gonna smell rank. Like medicine, and hospital.”

“Not tonight,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Friday, love. I thought we could get some takeaway. Although,” she concedes, a small frown wrinkling the space between her eyebrows. “I ain’t exactly familiar with the places round the new house. Oh, but Rhys might know. He offered to show me about sometime.” She gives a small, unconscious smile. 

“That one’s moving quickly, ain’t he?” Ryan mutters under his breath. Eggsy scowls and reaches out, thumbing at the controller until Ryan’s driver in MarioKart goes careening into a wall. “Oi! What’d you do that for?”

“That’s fine, mum,” Eggsy says, ignoring Ryan’s indignant sputtering. “Friday tea with the neighbor, yeah, that...sounds shit, if I’m being honest, but I ain’t gonna uninvite him or nothing.”

“I raised such a gentleman,” she says dryly, before heaving herself and Daisy into a standing position. “Now, be a love and watch the baby. I’m off to the house to talk about the kitchen with Merlin.”

Eggsy makes a show of sighing, but looks yearningly off to the side when Jamal finds himself, yet again, with a lap full of wriggling toddler. He’s not been able to hold Daisy himself, what with the state of his ribs, and he misses hugging his baby sister close and burying his nose into her downy soft hair, breathing in the vestiges of baby-smell that still cling to her after all this time. It’s not unusual for him to be delegated to babysitting duty, as long as someone else is there to make sure Daisy doesn’t trample on his broken bones, because Merlin has displayed a voracious interest in the interior decoration of their house, one that borders on manic. 

“You’ll be home soon enough, babe,” his mum whispers as she leans forward to kiss him goodbye, a brush of lips against the crest of his forehead. 

“Not nearly,” he grumbles, and does his best to turn his attention back to the video game. Every now and then, thoughts of a distant, careful smile churn through his head.

 

 

ooo

 

 

Eggsy’s new room is, for lack of better words,  _ the shit. _

His mum’s put him up in the Master, despite all of his grousing and insistence that she take it for herself, and it’s three times larger than the miniscule space he’d had in their flat with Dean.

His bed is a bloody Queen sized, giving him more room to splay about than he’s ever had in sleep before - not that he can take advantage of it, mind, what with the careful sleeping instructions he’d been carted out of hospital with. There’s an enormous telly on the wall, perched atop a bookshelf that’s filled to the brim with books and movies and games, and several state of the art gaming consoles he absolutely did not own before getting the shit beat out of him and landing himself in the favour of some posh strangers. 

The en-suite is fucking gorgeous, with a separate shower roomy enough for three people to stand in comfortably, and a jet lined bathtub that would happily seat another five. Eggsy nearly weeps at the sight of it, and his first night home enjoys a bath that is, according to his mum, almost distressingly long. 

It’s all taking a bit of getting used to, still. He wakes up with no real idea as to where he is, surrounded by walls different than those he spent his entire life encased by, but the strangeness of it all is infinitely better than the familiar agony of his previous home. 

His mum seems happier and brighter as well, though he catches her in moments of sadness, looking down at the plain wedding band she still wears around her finger. She’d loved Dean, as much as she could have done, and though the both of them know their lives are changing for the better without him to raise a voice or first, he feels a guilty twang for making his mum lose yet another person from her life.

“Honestly, Eggsy,” she tells him when he confesses this to her. “It’s not as bad as all that, babe. I’m happy here, with you and Daisy. Wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

Still, he can’t help but quietly call Merlin and arrange for a bouquet of his mum’s favourite flowers to be sent to the house, if only to see her shine brightly with happiness.

Friday rolls around quickly, and Rhys - good as his word - had given them a quick rundown of the best takeaway spots in the area. They’d settled on Thai, eventually, and when Michelle tries to tip the delivery boy who brings the steaming boxes of food around, he waves her off with an easy grin. “All taken care of, ma’am,” he assures. “I’d feel guilty taking anymore money off you.”

Eggsy, in the midst of unloading all the food, finds the receipt and goggles at the tip that either Merlin or Rhys has left. It’s more than he’d made in a couple of weeks, scrounging about his meagre earnings from sweeping up the Prince. He crumbles it up and tosses it into the bin when his mum tries to get a look, and receives a chastising purse of the lips in return.

Their minor squabble is interrupted by a series of succinct knocks at the front door, and they pause, looking at each other for a handful of seconds.

“I’ll get it,” Eggsy offers, and hobbles out of the kitchen and into the hallway. On the other side of the door, disguised by the frosted glass, there’s a shadowy figure. It’s indistinct but somehow memorable, like the flash of a memory Eggsy’s been holding onto for seventeen years.

He takes a minute to simply stand there in the hall, gazing at the silhouette, before he’s jarred out of his musing state by another two knocks at the door.

“Eggsy!” his mum calls. 

“Got it!” he says, and shuffles forward. His hand clasps around the door knob, and after a deep breath, he opens the door.

The man on the other side turns around from where he’d been casually surveying the street, and Eggsy’s breath catches in his throat.

“Oh,” says the _most gorgeous man_ Eggsy has ever seen in his life. “Hello.”

“Hi,” he says stupidly, and then says nothing else. 

The man shifts on his feet. “I’m your neighbor,” he offers, extending his right hand to shake. “Your mum invited me over for tea.”

Eggsy clumsily lifts his cast-encrusted arm as an explanation for why he’s not reciprocating the gesture. “Hi,” he says again, and promptly wants to set himself aflame. 

“Hello,” the man says, looking less wrong-footed and more amused, now. “You must be Eggsy. You've...grown, since I've last seen you.” A small flickering and speculative once over accompanies this last statement.

The sound of his own name shakes him out of his stupor. “Yeah,” he agrees, doing his best to slouch casually against the door. “Who’re you?”

The man’s lips part on a small laugh, blessedly not offended by Eggsy’s shocking manners. “My name is Harry Hart,” he says, and reaches out to curve his hand over the round of Eggsy’s shoulder. “Your father saved my life.”

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW I am so sorry about the delay for this real life has been a major pain in my ass 
> 
> plus I kind of lost my writing muse but then The News happened and I went back into my Kingsman hysteria so u kno...i'm trash again
> 
> when you picture Rhys (my go-to Gwaine OC), picture John Boyega


End file.
